Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Democratic Delegate Estimates (Based on Exit Polls)

I've used the exit polls available online to create a new (and very rough) estimate of how the Democratic Delegates may be allocated after today. In addition to all the cautions I mentioned here about why these estimates are error-prone, add to that the fact that exit polls have had notorious issues in correctly predicting the vote in recent elections. Nevertheless, here are the estimates based on the leaked exit polls.

Remember that there is no entrance polling in caucus states and I also found no information for Utah. However, if this is at all accurate, Obama would get 724 delegates, Clinton would receive 725, and 275 are in states with no exit poll information. The big thing to note here is that if these polls are correct, Obama would have run up the score significantly in IL while Clinton would have won her own state by a much smaller margin. Obama would also have benefited from running up the score in states like AL and GA.

Stay tuned...

UPDATE: I've updated the sheet to reflect the slightly different numbers that the media outlets have made available for the states where polls have closed. (NEP* indicates an exit poll from a media website, NEP indicates that I'm using numbers from leaked polls).

UPDATE 2: The sheet now reflects only one leaked exit poll (CA).

UPDATE 3: I've added UT's exit poll to the mix. Now just waiting for CA's.

UPDATE 4: Just added CA's exit polls from the media outlet websites. With regard to the unallocated 275 delegates, Obama seems to be doing well in those unpolled caucuses states so far.

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